Cha, in addition to being a prevalent beverage around Asia, is a seven-year-old Hong Kong-based English online lit mag. As it eponymously claims, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal's focus is on writing and art somehow related to Asia. You need not be Asian to be amongst its roster of established and new writers. This English-only lit mag is not quite quarterly--at the time of composing this review it was a month behind release schedule.

Work from its pages have been featured in Best of the Net, been translated into other languages, and led to published books and the International Grand Prix for Poetry. Its pedigree includes a connection to the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Editors are Hong Kongese, Canadian, and Singaporean. Contributors come from everywhere. Pieces vary in length from flash to just a few thousand words. They involve mainland China and Hong Kong, Singapore and Bhutan, or even departures to it such as leaving Hong Kong for Hawaii.

If your piece isn’t related to Asia, you won’t be submitting it here. Though if you’re into reading more globally, this is a terrific find for poetry, nonfiction, fiction, photography and art, and book reviews. In the “A Cup of Fine Tea” section, critics take on pieces from within the pages of the magazine as well as that of classic Asian works. Consider poet Red Slider’s critique of Yuen Ren Chao’s classic poem “Shi and the Ten Stone Lions.” The poem is originally written in Mandarin characters that translate into PinYin (the Romanized version of Mandarin characters) as shi. What’s fun about it is that the shi looks like shí, shì, and another one I cannot find on the Symbols menu of Word. The Chinese play with that word in a complicated way. It’s like our “She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore” and our trying to make complete sentences using nothing but the F word.

There is room for improvement in the site’s navigation. The writers guidelines mention, “Lost Teas,” a section where work published in now-defunct mags can be resurrected. But where is it? Another thing: If you can determine the purpose of “The Umbrella Movement” section, please elucidate me. The section didn’t appear in previous issues. It contained mostly photography/photo essays and a rather experimental piece labeled as poetry, though a sense of coherence was lost on me.

Now let’s consider its writing.

The poem, “The Castle Looms Blue,” stirred my interest in its writers Ravi Shankar and Joseph Stanton. Was this a posthumous publication of the famous sitarist (also Norah Jones’s father)? Nope. It’s a Pushcart-winning Indian poet published in The New York Times and The Paris Review who’s founding editor of Drunken Boat. His poetry is straightforward with light yet moving narrative arcs that I implore you to enter.

The fiction comes with a warning rather than beckoning. If you cannot make it through the pool masturbation scene in Chuck Paluhniuk’s short story “Guts,” don’t read Clara Chow’s “Teeth.” Stick through the award intro that seems plagued by numbers because this seemingly innocent short story about a boy’s relationship with his grandfather, a journeyman dentist, turns dark quickly. The beginning proffers an image of a crafty old man’s tray of teeth harvested from various patients. Other terrific images follow: “There couldn't have been more than five teeth left in the eighty-year-old's head, sticking up like tombstones or hanging like stalactites here and there.” The climax comes viscerally. In fact it made my stomach churn a couple of times, despite the fact I loved the story, at least for its author’s courageous imagination that created lines like this: “Wrenched from pulp and gum, the tooth tasted salty like dried snot.”

As a world traveler who writes about travel and space design, I could relate to Jamie Wang’s essay, “Humuhumu’s Longing.” Her wondering if she’d ever settle down in one place, ever find a definition for home, really resonated with me. I understood all too well when she wrote, “If James and I grow old together, will he secretly live in regret and despair from following me around to look for ‘the place’ to settle?” That constant moving about, that restlessness that eventually sent me globetrotting proved problematic throughout my own adulthood. Wang also has some gorgeous literary tropes and syntactical tricks that literary snobs like me find arresting. I do wish she could have made her conundrum, the point to ponder, a bit more precise. I also wish she’d have emotionally ventured further out and came up with a more controlled ending. Still, this piece will likely stick with me for at least a few days—as I indulge in another trip this very weekend.

Overall, bits and pieces of this mag will entertain you. You’ll find some entertaining value among the lot of the prose. You’ll find too the pieces bear less poignancy, most likely because Western (especially American) readers/writers require more literary dynamic feats. (At least so I’ve discovered this year, my Year of Colorful Reading, in which I’m reading authors from everywhere but the West.) Do go to Cha to learn about other cultures. Do go with your Asian-related literature.